Medieval Art Research

CFP: ‘Construction and Reconstruction in Medieval Urban Europe’, VII International Conference of the Middle Ages, Deadline: April 30th 2022

Cities were conspicuous in the Medieval landscape not only for being great concentrations of humanity, but also for their built-up areas. Buildings served various functions: military, religious, political-administrative, economic, and residential. Further, not all cities had the same buildings whilst, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and from street to street, building characteristics could differ according to an assortment of factors including the financial and material resources available, the type of labour-force employed in the building, the technical know-how applied, the length of the construction period, and the interests of those commissioning the work.

In moments of convulsion such as wars and rebellions, urban buildings could be destroyed requiring works of rebuilding and/or renovation that were not always easily affordable. In these present times of reconstruction, the Institute of Medieval Studies of NOVA-FCSH and the Municipality of Castelo de Vide have come together to organize the VII International Conference of the Middle Ages which will be held from 6th to 8th October 2022 under the theme: Construction and Reconstruction in Medieval Urban Europe.

A principal focus will be on Christian and Islamic Medieval Europe, embracing varied angles of approach. Researchers from any scientific discipline (including, History, Archaeology, Art History, Literature, Law, etc) with an interest in the foregoing, are invited to submit proposals for panels and/or individual papers within the following thematic groupings:

Current construction
Prestigious housing
Military buildings
Religious buildings
Buildings serving urban utilities and facilities/infrastructure
Financing construction and reconstruction
Construction techniques
Supply of construction raw materials
Reuse of construction materials
Construction regulations
The faces of construction: salaried workers, masters and others
Destruction and Reconstruction in “crisis” periods
Archeology of Architecture
Construction and reconstruction in urban space: representations in literature and art
The construction and reconstruction of Castelo de Vide during the Middle Ages

The Conference will comprise 4 plenary sessions featuring researchers invited by the organizing committee, along with separate thematic panels. Each panel will be made up of three paper presentations and will be 60 minutes long. Researchers wishing to participate are requested to submit proposals for whole panels and/or individual papers, the latter being arranged by the organizing committee into coherent panels. The Conference includes a full cultural program with guided tours, Conference Dinner, and a public Book Launch to present the published volume which brings together a selection of articles gathered from the VI International Conference of the Middle Ages and the Autumn School of October 2021.

Conference languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French and English.

Keynote speakers: Four keynote speakers to be confirmed.

Scientific committee: Adelaide Millán Costa (U. Aberta)
Alberto García Porras (U. Granada)
Antonio Collantes de Terán (U. de Sevilha)
Antonio Malpica Cuello (U. de Granada)
Arnaldo Sousa Melo (U. de Minho)
Beatriz Arizaga Bolumburu (U. de Cantábria)
Catarina Tente (U. Nova de Lisboa)
David Igual Luis (U.de Castilla-La Mancha)
Denis Menjot (U. Lyon 2)
Dominique Valérian (U. Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Eloísa Ramirez Vaquero (U. Pública de Navarra)
Emilio Martín Gutiérrez (U. de Cadiz)
Gregoria Cavero Domínguez (U. de León)
Hermenegildo Fernandes (U. Lisboa)
Hermínia Vilar (U. Évora)
Iria Gonçalves (U. Nova de Lisboa)
Isabel del Val Valdivieso (U. de Valladolid)
Jean Passini (EHESS-Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales)
Jean-Luc Fray (U. Clermont Auvergne)
Jesús Solórzano Telechea (U. de Cantábria)
José Avelino Gutiérrez González (U. de Oviedo)
Louis Sicking (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam/Universiteit Leiden)
Luísa Trindade (U. de Coimbra)
María Asenjo González (U. Complutense de Madrid)
Maria João Branco (U. Nova de Lisboa)
Maria Filomena Barros (U. de Évora)
Maria Helena da Cruz Coelho (U. de Coimbra)
Mário Barroca (U. do Porto)
Michel Bochaca (U. de La Rochelle)
Pere Verdés Pijuan (IMF-CSIC)
Peter Clark (U. de Helsínquia)
Raphaella Averkorn (U. Siegen)
Sara Prata (U. Nova de Lisboa)
Sauro Gelichi (U. Ca ‘Foscari de Veneza)
Stéphane Péquignot (École Pratique des Hautes Études/Université PSL)
Wim Blockmans (U. de Leiden)

Organizing Committee:
Amélia Aguiar Andrade (IEM | NOVA FCSH)
Gonçalo Melo da Silva (IEM | NOVA FCSH)
Patrícia Martins (CMCV)

Secretariat:
Mariana Pereira (IEM | NOVA FCSH)
Ricardo Cordeiro (IEM | NOVA FCSH)

Supporters: IEM – NOVA FCSH; CMCV; FCT; NOVA FCSH

Transportation The organization will provide transport by coach for speakers from campus NOVA-FCSH-Castelo de Vide-campus NOVA-FCSH. The registration pack for speakers includes coach transport from Lisbon Airport – Castelo de Vide – Lisbon Airport, lunch during conference days, guided tour of Castelo de Vide and Conference Dinner.

Deadline for proposals for panels and papers: April 30^th
Panels, Papers and Posters acceptance: May 7th

Conference fees Speakers (general): 50 €
University students (undergraduates, MA and PhD): 40 €
IEM integrated researchers and students at NOVA FCSH: 30 €

More information: http://idade-media.castelodevide.pt/en_GB/

Call for Papers PT [PDF]
Call for Papers EN [PDF]
Call for Papers ES [PDF]
Call for Papers FR [PDF]

Funding Opportunity: British Archaeological Association Travel Grants 2022, Deadline: 15th March and 15th May

Applications for travel grants are invited from students registered on post-graduate degree courses (at M.A., M.Litt., M.St., M.Phil., and Ph.D. level). Grants of up to £500 are available to cover travel for a defined purpose (such as essential site visits, attendance at an exhibition/conference, short research trip, etc). The awards are made twice yearly, with deadlines for applications on 15 March and 15 May.

Applicants are required to provide one reference, together with a timetable and travel budget, while the objective of the travel must fall within the Association’s fields of interest (as defined below). Applicants should either be registered at a UK University, or be undertaking work on material from, in, or related to, the art, architecture or archaeology of the British Isles. Applicants are also responsible for asking their nominated referee to forward a reference directly to the Hon. Secretary within one week of the closing date for applications.

An application form follows on a second page. Once complete this should be sent as an email attachment to the Hon. Secretary on secretary@thebaa.orgFunds are limited, so the awards are competitive. Given current Covid-related travel restrictions, it is possible that successful applicants will be unable to undertake the travel for which an award was made. In that event, we would ask that the grant instead be used for high-quality dissertation or thesis illustrations or be used within a year for future travel with an art-historical or archaeological objective. If successful, the Association would like candidates to write a short account (150-350 words) of the travel facilitated by the award that could be posted on the BAA website.

BAA STATEMENT OF INTEREST

The Association’s interests are defined as the study of archaeology, art and architecture from the Roman period to the present day, principally within Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The core interests of the BAA are Roman to 16th century. We only entertain applications that cover the 17th to 21st centuries if they are of an historiographical, conservationist or antiquarian nature and link back to the BAA’s core interests.

REPORTS FROM AWARDEES

Alfie Robinson (2021)

Millie Horton-Insch (2021)

Winners of the Travel Awards

YEAR	WINNER	TITLE
2021	Alfie Robinson	Late Medieval architectural models – for travel to east Lincolnshire, Oxford and Arlingham (Gloucs)
2021	Kelli Anderson	Romanesque architecture – for travel to Waltham Abbey, Romsey Abbey, Durham, Norwich and Lichfield cathedrals
2021	Megan Bunce	Early medieval stone sculpture – for travel to Edinburgh, Tarbet, Elgin and Lerwick
2021	Alex Elliott	Late Roman naval organisation – for travel to Saxon Shore forts at Portchester, Pevensey and Dover
2021	Nicholas Flory	Female Carthusian patronage – for travel to Cartuja de Miraflores, Burgos
2021	Millie Horton-Insch	Eleventh-Century Embroidery in England – for travel to Edinburgh and Orkney (St Magnus, Kirkwall)
2021	Cian Kinsella	Ovid and Art: for travel to Rome (Galleria Borghese and Villa Farnesina)
2021	Scott McCreadie	Viking stone sculpture – for travel and fieldwork in Shetland
2021	Teresa Porciani	Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture – for travel to Lindisfarne, Norham, Bewcastle and Ruthwell
2021	Michela Young	Vallombrosan monasticism – for travel to northern Tuscany (Florence and hinterland)

To download the application form, click here

Hybrid Lecture: ‘Astronomy in the Great Mosque of Damascus’, Yusuf Tayara, Durham University and Zoom, 15th March 2022, 17:00 (GMT)

Join us at the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University, 7 Owengate, Durham, DH1 3HB, on March 15 at 5:00 p.m. to hear Yusuf Tayara of the Oxford University History Department present his research on ‘Astronomy in the Great Mosque of Damascus: Towards a Social History of Mamluk Astronomy’.

Between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Syria and Egypt’s Mamluk rulers instituted a range of practical reforms within those countries’ religious institutions. Among them was the gradual introduction of the muwaqqit, or timekeeper, in the dominion’s major mosques. In this paper, I focus on the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, one of the oldest continually used religious sites in the history of Islam. As an institution it has housed some of the Islamic world’s most prominent theologians and religious thinkers. The mosque has also produced one of Islam’s greatest technical astronomers, the muwaqqitIbn al-Shatir (1304–75). I examine how the shifting political and social conditions of Mamluk Damascus came tobear on the astronomical practices of Ibn al-Shatir and his fellow timekeepers. I do so by taking a wider view of the Umayyad Mosque as an institution of technical and religious learning, and as a political symbol of Sunni Islam in a period of high political turmoil. My central contention is that the prevailing mosque hierarchies in the fourteenth century imparted a distinctively practical or folk-astronomical flavour to the writings of technical astronomers in the period. I conclude with some comments on the historiography of astronomy in the Islamic world, highlighting exactly why social histories of science in the Muslim world are generally lacking.

This talk is co-sponsored by the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Working Group of the History Department and the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University.

New Publication: ‘Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas’ edited by Alessia Frassani

This volume explores how visual arts functioned in the indigenous pre- and post-conquest New World as vehicles of social, religious, and political identity. Twelve scholars in the eld of visual arts examine indigenous artistic expressions in the American continent from the pre-Hispanic age to the present. The contributions ofer new interpretations of materials, objects, and techniques based on a critical analysis of historical and iconographic sources and argue that indigenous agency in the continent has been primarily conceived and expressed in visual forms in spite of the textual epistemology imposed since the conquest.

Contributors are: Miguel Arisa, Mary Brown, Ananda Cohen- Aponte, Elena FitzPatrick Siford, Alessia Frassani, Jeremy James George, Orlando Hernández Ying, Angela Herren Rajagopalan, Keith Jordan, Lorena Tezanos Toral, Marcus B. Burke, and Lawrence Waldron.

Readership

Archaeologists, art historians, and researchers in culture area studies related to Latin America and the Caribbean. Research institutes, libraries, and universities with both undergraduate and post-graduate students and faculty with interests in these areas.

Alessia Frassani, Ph.D. (2009), City University of New York, has published books and articles on Mesoamerican pictography and colonial Latin American art, including Building Yanhuitlan: Art, politics, and religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500(University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

Online Lecture: The History and Significance of the Byzantine Prothesis Ritual, Nina Glibetić, Zoom, 17th February 2022, 17:00 (EST)

The Mary Jaharis Center is pleased to announce our next lecture: The History and Significance of the Byzantine Prothesis Ritual. In this lecture, Nina Glibetić, University of Notre Dame, discusses the history and development of Byzantine Prothesis ritual. This talk brings together manuscripts in several languages in order to trace the shifts and expansions of the Prothesis over time. It also nuances previous scholarly narratives by pointing to early Byzantine antecedents to this ritual and highlighting the diversity in local practices that characterized this rite prior to the emergence of its definitive form in Late Byzantium.

This lecture will take place live on Zoom, followed by a question and answer period. Please register to receive the Zoom link. REGISTER HERE.

Sponsored by the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.

Online Lecture: ‘The Guest of the Body – Visualising Souls in Medieval Europe, 1100-1200’, Shirin Fozi, 27th April 2022, 17:00-18:30 (BST)

The art of medieval Europe emphasizes the eschatological future in terms that can often surprise contemporary viewers. Christian anxieties about the apocalypse – the longing for resurrection, the fear of eternal damnation, the hopes of attaining a place in paradise – hinged on the desire for a successful reunification of the bodies and souls of the dead. These two aspects of the self were seen as diametrically opposed in many ways; the flawed, mortal, ephemeral reality of the body could not be more different than the abstract and ineffable qualities of its invisible pendant. In order to represent these contrasts, however, medieval artists visualized the soul in forms that would be recognizable for their audiences, favoring the anthropomorphic soul that could take flight with the assistance of angels. This talk looks at a series of medieval images, particularly funerary monuments, that reflect on the departure of the soul and emphasize its fraught relationship to the body that is left behind, and to which it shall return. Even as bodies were present throughout medieval Christian spaces – buried in chapels and crypts, or raised as relics in altars and shrines – souls occupied a strange position in between presence and absence, dissolving deep divides between heaven and earth, or between the mundane experience of daily life and the end of days, that distant and yet rapidly approaching frontier of Christian time.

Shirin Fozi is Associate Professor in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of a monograph titled Romanesque Tomb Effigies: Death and Redemption in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200 (2021), which received a Millard Meiss Grant from the College Art Association, and co-editor of Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucifix and the Rise of Medieval Wood Sculpture (2020). Fozi has also published several articles on modern collections of medieval art, and her most recent Museum Studies seminar culminated in a student-curated online exhibition called A Nostalgic Filter: Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age (2020).

Organised by Dr Tom Nickson (The Courtauld) and Dr Jessica Barker (The Courtauld)

Booking will open shortly via this link.

Online Lecture: ‘The Psycho-Architectonics of the Imżā Inscriptions – Denotations and Connotations of Text in the Arts of the Safavids’, Dr Mahroo Moosavi, 3rd March 2022, 18:00-19:30 (GMT)

By working between the two media of art and literature, this paper challenges some manners by which the textually infused arts of the early modern Iran have been conventionally perceived. While through the inherited discourse of Western art history, the inscription or epigraph is an appurtenance of the object’s visual and thematic language or is, on some occasions, reduced to a purely scientific and palaeographic element, this paper suggests an alternate discourse that extends the significance of such texts, especially the imżā [signature] inscriptions, beyond the normative, emphasising their particular agency as possible strategic ‘interventions’ envisioned and adopted by the artist, architect, or the patron.

Tracing its earlier roots in the increasing use and thematic specificities of text in the artistic productions of the Persianate societies from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onwards, this paper aims to open the current methodologies and understandings of the arts of the Safavids (1501-1722 AD) to a rereading. It does so by engaging with the ‘signature inscriptions’ as systematic architectonic design strategies that constantly de and re construct the object/space and the inter-woven micro politico-cultural context around it through activating the emotive-cognitive recipients of the user. By focusing on a number of cases such as the early seventeenth century mosque of Luṭfullāh in Isfahan and the mid-sixteenth century Sultan Ibrāhīm Mīrzā’s manuscript of Haft Awrang of Jāmī, this study shows how the application of text in the arts of early modern Iran operates as a mechanism through which the boundaries between different branches of art and knowledge may blur, making space for the reception and perception of art as an abstruse apparatus that functions through the layers of connotations of Persian psyche, language and literature.

Dr Mahroo Moosavi is Bahari Fellow in the Persian Arts of the Book at University of Oxford, Oliver Smithies Lecturer at Balliol College, University of Oxford, and Lecturer in architectural history, theory, and design at the University of Sydney. Her research is concerned with the intertext of art/architecture and poetry/prose, with a particular focus on the early modern Iran, through an interdisciplinary study of art/architectural history, literature, and post-structuralist philosophy. Her current project analyses the interpretations of form and structure of rhetorical devices in the chancellery writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Iran to discern possible resonances within the artistic and urban system of the new city of Isfahan.

Iran Re-search / The Bahari Foundation Lectures on Art and Culture is an annual lecture series inviting practicing artists, curators and scholars to think afresh about the trajectories of knowledge production on material and visual cultures of Iran. The Iran Re-search Bahari Lecture Series aims to foreground transdisciplinary and cross-temporal approaches, considering as wide a range as contemporary arts and the antiquities of Iran.

Organised by Professor Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld)

Hybrid Lecture: ‘The Concealment of Sacred Objects during The English Reformation: Evidence of Piety or Protest’, Bruce Watson FSA,1st March 2022, 13:00-14:00 (GMT)

One aspect of the English Reformation (1533-53) was a dramatic change of doctrine from Roman Catholic to the Protestant, which involved an attack on ‘traditional religion’, statues were forbidden, the celebration of Mass was banned and finally, all the redundant liturgical goods and vestments were confiscated by the Crown. To what degree were these changes of doctrine welcomed or opposed by the clergy and general population? One overlooked source of information is the evidence for the deliberate concealment of banned goods including censers, crucifixions, saints’ relics and statues. Often these objects were concealed within or adjoining the churches where they had probably been used, but sometimes material was concealed further afield. We only know of this practice due to a handful of historical references and the accidental rediscovery of this material centuries later often during church restoration. Objects were buried under church floors, outside in burial grounds, or walled up inside internal cavities like redundant niches for statues. I started to research this topic some years ago and quickly realised that the concealment of religious objects during the Reformation was an overlooked phenomenon.

The late Margaret Aston in Broken Idols of the English Reformation (2016, p.219) wrote that: ‘the archaeology of concealment [during the Reformation] is a subject that awaits proper investigation’. Often examples of the concealment of objects has not been recognised or properly documented. What interests me is the motivation of those involved, they were disobeying the Crown and risked punishment. Were they pious individuals who that hoped if doctrine changed (as it did the Marian Catholic revival of 1553-58, then this material could be retrieved and reused – this did happen) or were they simply protesting against the theft of their parish’s property by the avaricious, but cash-strapped Crown? Remember these people had recently witnessed the state-sponsored looting of the monasteries and the chantries, so in 1552 when the Crown ordered the compilation of a second inventory of English parish church goods, there was good reason to be concerned.

A short article on this subject entitled: ‘How a passion for toppling statues was subverted’ was published by the author in British Archaeol (no 177, p.10-11) in 2021.

Attendance at Burlington House:

Open to anyone to join, Fellows and Non-Fellows.
Registration is essential.
Places in person will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
The event will begin at 13.00 GMT. Please arrive in plenty of time.
All attendees should scan the NHS QR code available at the entrance. For further details on the Government guidelines regarding COVID-19 and track and trace please visit their website here.

Attendance by Live Stream:

Open to anyone to join, Fellows and Non-Fellows.
The event will be live-streamed to YouTube here
The event will begin at 13.00 GMT.
You will receive an email reminder with the link to join the day before the lecture.

Please help the Society continue to deliver our FREE online Lecture Programme by making a donation to cover the cost of upgraded IT and software. We would really appreciate your support. Thank you!

If you have any questions please contact us on communications@sal.org.uk

Book your tickets here.

Lecture: ‘Dead Reckoning: The Material Legacy of Eudes of Nevers (d.1266)’, Anne Lester, UCL and Online, 17th March 2022, 17:30-19:00 (GMT)

IHR European History 1100-1550 Lecture Series: Hybrid Meeting – UCL, Cruciform Lecture Theatre 2 & Online via zoom

On 7 August 1266 the crusading Count Eudes of Nevers died in Acre. Eudes had come to Outremer in 1265 to aid the permanent French garrison maintained in the city, known as the stependarii. At the time of his death and in the months that followed three knights who served as his legal executors drew up a detailed inventory of his personal and household goods, tallied his accounts, and paid off his final debts. No doubt such accounting was routine for men like Eudes who lived and died in the east, away from home and family. The survival of such records, however, is rare if unprecedented. Five parchments rolls, now in the Archives nationales in Paris, shed light the contents of his wardrobe, kitchens, pantry, stables, and chapel, and list the pay he owed to over three dozen men in his employ, the value of the clothes and textiles he possessed and the jewels, relics, and personal items he treasured. My talk begins with an introduction to these texts and offers a close reading of the material world of an aristocratic crusader in the mid-thirteenth century. Reconstructing Eudes’s material life also means reckoning with the extravagant wealth a crusader of his stature carried into the east and thus considering the function of objects: their role as stores of wealth, mechanisms of patronage, affectations of masculinity, performances of power, and markers of piety. My remarks also address the potentials and limitations of a material methodology and our discipline’s current reckonings with ‘materiality’.

Please note that there is a limited capacity on campus. If you have not selected an ‘in-person ticket’ please do not go to UCL, but join online. Click here to book.

You are requested to wear masks at UCL(Opens in new window).

All welcome– this seminar is free to attend but booking in advance is required.

Lecture: ‘The Crivelli Conversation’, Dr Caroline Campbell, Jonathan Watkins and Amanda Hilliam, National Gallery, London and Online, 22nd February 2022, 13:00-13:45 (GMT)

It is possible to book to attend this lecture in person in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, London, or to watch via live stream.

Caroline Campbell discusses Crivelli’s illusionism with Jonathan Watkins and Amanda Hilliam, co-curators of an exciting new exhibition at the Ikon Gallery

The 15th-century Italian Renaissance painter, Carlo Crivelli, was a master of illusion and perspective. His remarkable tricks of the eye seem to point towards a post-modern art historical future, as radical in its own way as modern artists such as Magritte, and his work remains a recurring source of artistic inspiration.

Caroline Campbell, Director of Collections and Research joins Jonathan Watkins, Director of Ikon Gallery and co-curator Amanda Hilliam to discuss an exciting new exhibition, ‘Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky’, opening at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (23 February to 29 May 2022), to which the National Gallery is delighted to lend four of Crivelli’s masterpieces.

To coincide with this important exhibition, a display of works will also be on show in Room 54.

To book tickets for the live stream of the talk taking place in the Sainsbury Wing Theatre please click here. If you would prefer to book to attend in person, please click here.

Dr Caroline Campbell is our Director of Collections and Research. A specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, her interests range from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. At the Gallery, she has curated ‘Mantegna and Bellini’ (2018), ‘Building the Picture’ (2014), and ‘Duccio | Caro’ (2015) among other exhibitions.

Jonathan Watkins is Director of Ikon Gallery. He has curated international exhibitions including Biennales in Sydney (1998), Sharjah (2007) and Quebec (2019), Triennials at Tate (2003) and Guangzhou (2012) as well as ‘Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art’ (Hayward Gallery, 2001) and ‘Floating World’, Bahrain (2017). In 2019 he won the Ampersand Award to realise the exhibition of his dreams (Carlo Crivelli, 2022).

Amanda Hilliam is co-curator of ‘Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky’ at Ikon Gallery. She is an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld and previously held the David and Julie Tobey fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation curatorial fellowship at the National Gallery of Art. Her monograph on Carlo Crivelli is forthcoming with Reaktion Books.